September 1, 2025 • 59 mins
New York in the early 1900s was filled with people trying to make their lives better. But for many, the rise of organized crime kept them in constant fear. On the Lower East Side, Jewish criminals from Eastern Europe formed crime syndicates. There were gangs of horse poisoners, casino owners, thieves and thugs. But then a group of Jewish uptowners stepped in and created a vice squad that worked in secrecy. Author Dan Slater tells us the story from his book: The Incorruptibles.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
You have to sever the tie between the underworld and
the overworld, and you need to expose the connection and
sever it, and so that was part of the strategy.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:53):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. New York and the early
nineteen hundreds was filled with people trying to make their
(01:14):
lives better, but for many, the rise of organized crime
kept them in constant fear. On the Lower East Side,
Jewish criminals from Eastern Europe formed crime syndicates. There were
gangs of horse poisoners, casino owners, thieves, and thugs, but
then a group of Jewish uptowners stepped in and created
a vice squad that worked in secrecy. Author Dan Slater
(01:37):
tells us the story from his book The Incorruptibles set
the scene for me for where we are and what
New York City is like during this time period.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Well, we are in the New York City of the
late eighteen hundreds, and it is a time when there's
a lot of immigration from many parts of the world.
By there's a lot of immigration from Eastern Europe. You
have a lot of Jewish refugees streaming in from Eastern Europe,
Russia and the surrounding areas, and they're fleeing a lot
(02:13):
of massacres. They're fleeing centuries of severe Prussian and they
are coming to New York, which in the eighteen eighties
and eighteen nineties is legally considered kind of wide open.
There are really very few laws or regulations that are
limiting vice and crime. And they are the marginalized folks,
(02:37):
and so they find themselves being drawn into the underworld.
And that's kind of where we are when the book
opens up.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
I feel like when a vasta, when there's a wave
of immigrants who come into New York in that time
period and maybe a little bit later. Is that when
they sort of take over, Like when the Irish first arrived,
that's when we see the Irish mall. When the Italians
first arrive, is that when we see the mafias. I
don't know if that's right or not, but it just
seems like there's turf wars when a new group that
(03:08):
could dominate comes in.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I would say, yes, yes, and no, I don't think
America or New York for it. You know, New York
or the rest of the country had seen organized vice
in the way that the Jews brought it in. And
that's partly because they had been organizing vice at that
point for centuries, going back to the money lending days,
(03:34):
and they understood how to organize an underworld economy in
a way that other ethnicities ever had before. And so
that's why the subtitle of my book has the words
the Birth of the American Underworld, because part of the
argument that I'm making is that it really starts here
with these folks and not with the Italians, which was
(03:57):
the impression that I had grown up with. I mean,
I was I was born in the you know, the
late nineteen seventies, and I grew up with sort of
the Martin Scorsese stuff and all of that, and I
just figured organized crime, the mafia. Everybody knows that. And
I think part of my motivation to do this book
(04:20):
was the discovery that, hey, it actually began at an
earlier point with a whole other group of people, and
it was a story it seems like, was kind of lost.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
When your characters come in, and you can tell me
if that's the you know, nineteen tens or twenties, when
they come in, what is the geography like for the
people who are running these different factions? Where are people located? Where?
You know New Yorkers? While I lived in New York
for ten years, what would I recognize now as these
locations of where each kind of where the groups were.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
So you have the Eastern European Jewish refugees amassing mainly
in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which by about
nineteen oh seven nineteen oh eight was the most densely
packed urban area in the world. It had surpassed Bombay,
India for that title, Bombay being the modern day Mumbai.
(05:14):
What did that mean in terms of numbers? There were
as many as sixteen hundred people living on a single
square block in the lower East Side. There was a
lot of people, there were a lot of density, There
weren't a lot of opportunities. It was a ghetto and
it was a place that was populated by the people
(05:36):
who had really invented the ghetto, you know. The ghetto
is a term that goes back to Venice. It originates
in the early fifteen hundreds when a bunch of Jewish
refugees again show up in Venice in like fifteen oh nine,
and the people of Venice are divided over what to
do with these folks. The religious people in Venice want
(05:58):
the Jews gone, and the more secular people in Venice,
the people in the government say, hey, wait, they can
be useful as money lenders and as garment manufacturers, and
so let's figure out a way to keep them. And
the solution they came up with was to take an
island called the ghetto. It was called the ghetto because
(06:19):
it had been a copper foundry, and ghetto is derived
from gaeta, which means to throw or to cast. And
they said, well, put them all in the ghetto and
during the day they can come on to the main
part of Venice to do their jobs and then at
night they'll go back. And that's where the word literally
(06:43):
comes from. And so these were people who had been
ghetto eyes marginalized for like I said, centuries. And so
by the time they get to New York in the
early nineteen in the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds,
this is not a strange state of affairs for them
necessarily to be living in kind of the worst part
(07:04):
of town, to not have a lot of things available
to them that other people that other people.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Might So the Lower East Side was that considered a
melting pot or was it very clearly segregated based on
you know, the immigrants who were there were these sixteen
hundred people in one block, all you know, Jewish refugees
or from Eastern Europe.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Mainly, but there were lots of other folks mixed in.
But yes, in the main it was a Jewish ghetto.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
So your main players and where that kind of action starts, Well,
are we through the origin story of how these people
ended up here or do we need to continue on
in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds before we
get kind of to the meat of the story.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah, So the main players in the book, I would
say two of them are products of the immag that
we're talking about, and one of them is a product
of immigration, but from a slightly earlier period. They are
all Jewish, Two of them are pretty young, one of
(08:12):
them is a little bit older.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Are these folks your main players people who in Eastern
Europe had played similar roles? I mean, were these always
sort of people who were involved in crime or is
this a new thing that's that they're adapting to in
New York.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
The individuals themselves had not been involved in crime in
Eastern Europe, but their ancestors definitely had been.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
So tell me where we start here with this group.
Do we talk about him as a group or do
you want to talk about them as individual people.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
There are two characters who cross paths with each other,
and then there's a third character who is kind of
separate from that. We have a crime fighter who's a
young man who wants to reform the Lower east Side.
He is the son of Eastern European refugees born in
(09:08):
the Lower east Side, and he is the child of reformers.
He has a father who's a pretty well known reformer
who is always trying to improve the Neighborhood improve Society,
trying to get more labor rights for the Jews in
the Lower east Side, trying to eliminate the prostitution in
the Lower east Side. So this figure was sort of
(09:30):
raised in that environment. There's a young woman who is
herself a refugee. She comes over as a child, and
we see her get lured into the underworld and then
later recruited over to the cause of attempting to eliminate
the underworld. And then third, we have a figure who
(09:54):
is one of the main figures in the book who
is sort of more known to history. His name is
is Arnold Rothstein, and some people will know that name immediately.
Many of these days, I'm finding do not know his
name anymore. But if you've ever read The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, you have gotten a little bit
of a taste of Arnold Rosstein, because there is a
(10:17):
figure in Gatsby who is based directly on Rostein, and
that's the character in the novel who is supposed to
have sort of trained Gatsby and given him his initial opportunities.
One of the best places to really start the stories
(10:39):
in the summer of nineteen twelve. That's not when the
book itself begins, but it's when the story really starts
to pick up steam. And by the summer of nineteen twelve,
Jewish crime had been a running problem for many years.
It had been a source of embarrassment to some people
(11:01):
on the Lower east Side, who fashioned themselves reformers, but
it had also been a source of embarrassment to the
other group of Jewish people who were living in Manhattan
at the time, and those were the German Jews who
were living uptown, largely in the Upper east Side, in
big mansions. And these were folks who had come to
America a generation chou before the Russians, and they had
(11:26):
famously done very well. Here. We know many of their
names because those names still adorn important institutions Lehmann, Solomon,
the Guggenheims, etc. And they're looking downtown and right at
the moment when they figure, Okay, we've kind of assimilated,
we've become successful beyond our wildness. Dreams were on the
(11:49):
verge of being accepted by the Protestants, the blue Bloods,
the Yankees, and now here come these co religionous of
ours who we really don't know, but that are connected
to us religion, and they're from a totally different place.
They're from this kind of backwater. They lack education, they
lack language abilities, and they're streaming into the ghetto and
(12:11):
they're making the ghetto what the ghetto is known for,
which is tough living and a lot of crime. And
so these uptowners wanted to eliminate the underworld as well,
and they never really knew how to do it. The
first decade or so of the nineteen hundreds, they made attempts.
Those attempts would often blow back in their face. And
(12:31):
so here comes the summer of nineteen twelve, and it's
going to really push them to do something beyond what
they had tried before. And the reason was is that
that summer there was a gambler who was murdered outside
of hotel in Times Square. And the murder, it was
a murder of a gambler, It was a murder of
(12:51):
a Jewish gambler, and the murder generated a lot of
publicity for various reasons. One of the reasons was that
they're was a cop who allegedly had ordered the murder.
And so this was a murder that you know, the
folks involved in the murder might have thought that this
is not going to get any attention. It's just one
of many murders that happens every day in the city.
(13:14):
But it ended up being on front pages for the
next three years because of its interesting circumstances. And so
these uptowners are now saying, we have to do something.
And that's when they say, all right, we have found
this young man from the Lower east Side who raised
(13:35):
on the Lower east Side, raised among the underworld. His
father was a reformer who had tried himself to do
various things to eliminate the underworld. This is a young
guy who's very motivated. We need to tap him and
get in touch with him, and they recruit him to
lead what becomes eventually a war on the underworlds. So
(14:00):
to put it in sort of pop culture terms that
people may be more familiar with, it's like a little
bit like the elliot Ness story The Untouchables. I didn't
call the book The Incorruptibles because it sounds similar to
The Untouchables. I called it The Incorruptibles because this young
man is eventually moved into the NYPD and they give
(14:22):
him his own squad of cops, and this squad becomes
known as the Incorruptibles. So that's where the title of
the book comes from, and that's really how my story begins.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Before we get to the story, let's go back. What
was the motivation for Jewish people from Germany to come
to the United States. It must have been business opportunities
or or what was it.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
It was a it was a number of things. The
German Jews had not experienced oppression like the Eastern Europeans had,
but it was still it was. That was not to
say that life was good in any any Semitism free
in Germany. It was. It was bad. But there had
been a Jewish enlightenment in the late seventeen hundreds there
(15:06):
in Germany, and life had vastly improved over the next
thirty or forty years, but it was there was still there,
you know, still oppression. And then there's all this opportunity
that's rumored to exist in the US. And there were
a lot of Germans who were coming to the States
(15:28):
and they were writing these travel guides, publishing these books
that would get published back in Germany. So people in
Germany were reading these books about all the opportunity that
you know existed, and so that was partly responsible for
the German Jewish immigration, and they mainly came over in
the eighteen forties. There were about forty thousand of them
that arrived in the eighteen forties, and by the sixties, seventies,
(15:53):
and eighties many of them had moved to Wall Street
and were very successful there.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
When we talk about Jewish crime, what does that mean?
Does that mean that the people who are causing crime around,
you know, across the city or mainly Lower East Side
come from the Jewish people who came from Eastern Europe
and they're the origin or they're you know, some of
the biggest movers in the crime world. Or is it
literally Jewish on Jewish crime.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
It's a lot of Jewish on Jewish crime. Very interesting
and disturbing. Example of that were the Yiddish horse poisoners.
This was a gang that made their money by extorting
business owners in the neighborhood who relied on horses to
get their products around. Some of the most vulnerable were
(16:38):
people who sold the perishable item. If you sold ice
cream or if you sold produce, you know, you needed
your horses ready to get that product to the customer
in a timely fashion. And so the Yiddish horse poisoners
would go around extorting these, you know, business owners, if
you don't pay us a certain amount of money every
(16:59):
month to poison your horses, and these guys were terrifying,
and if you didn't pay up, they came through. They
did what they said that they were going to do.
Most of the sex work on the Lower East Side,
which there was a ton of, that was mainly all
within the community. So the crazy thing about sex work
(17:20):
within the Jewish community was that it was highly organized.
And that's an important thing to understand because it affects
the rest of the story. There was an actual corporation
of pimps. They had filed in corporation papers and a
corporate constitution in Albany under New York state law. And
(17:46):
they would gather at a cafe at ninety two Second
Avenue to do business with each other, to network, to
pull their money to pay off the cops every month.
And they would also be involved in the recruiting of
sex workers, which happened all over the city. You'd go
to restaurants look for waitresses, you'd go up to the
(18:12):
departments tours like Macy's and look for the people who
worked as the shop girls. So yeah, there was a
lot of sex work on the Lower east Side. It
was very organized and like I said, it catered to
both Lower East Siders themselves and also even to people
who visited city.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I don't know if you've ever read one of these,
but for a book that I did that was set
in New York in the eighteen seventies, they had published
these small books that men could buy for I don't
know how much, a few books, which would have been
a lot of money then. And it was literally like
a menu of where to go, what brothels to go.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
The passwords that you need to get into them, yes.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
And recommendations in certain houses. And it varied from block
to block. Especially, you know, my area was the Irving
Plaza Irving Place area, and so it was like block
to block you could have a five star place or
it would be a one star.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
I think the important thing to know about well about
sex work in general, but particularly sex work as it
pertains to the Lower East Side, was that during this
time period, prior to the you know, the labor laws
that we have now and take for granted now, there
were no labor protections at all. So the garbage industry
(19:33):
was based in the Lower East Side. It was a
Jewish industry. There were Italian women who worked in it.
There were women from other ethnicities who worked in it,
but by and large it was a Jewish thing. There
were these factories, there were these sweatshops all over the
Lower east Side, and there was no minimum wage, there
was no cap on hours worked, there were no safety regulations,
(19:56):
there was nothing. So for a lot of these young
women who were coming in, you know, as the immigrants,
the decision was kind of stark. It was like, we
can work in these factories and here's what that looks like,
or there's sex work.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Was there a hierarchy with the different sort of I
don't know if you call them families or groups or
what you would say. I'm so used to families because
of course the Godfather and stuff. Was there a hierarchy?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
There weren't Jewish organized crime families per se. Yeah, you
didn't see that tradition, the sort of the kind of
handed down the way we associated with the Italians, because
you have a lot of families that were divided. You know,
internally you'd have sort of the black sheep off doing
(20:46):
his or earth thing. But then you had folks who
might be reformers as well.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Well, let's start with the story now. You had said that,
you know, was it the summer of nineteen twelve that
a gangster was murdered in Times Square? And that's kind
of what the ball rolling with the people who came
from Germany, who said, we've got to get a hold
of this because they're giving us a bad name or
giving us too much attention or whatever.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
And I think the other is because I think it's
important to establish the motivations of why did these wealthy
uptowners feel the need to intervene. It was definitely bad name.
They felt they'd worked for decades to be accepted and
to assimilate, and they felt that their chances of being
accepted were now diminished. But these folks also really believed,
(21:32):
I think in the Promise of America. They believed in
open borders. It had been the thing that benefited then
and they didn't want to see that go away. Meanwhile,
there was this big anti immigration movement that had begun
in the eighteen nineties and by nineteen twelve was beginning
(21:52):
to gain some steam, and the anti immigration folks they
wanted to shut down the borders. They wanted to stop
immigration entirely. They wanted eugenics to play a role in
the siding who could have a baby, all that stuff.
And so the German Jews defined themselves partly in opposition
to this anti immigration movement. And that was another reason
(22:15):
why they wanted to eliminate the Jewish onward of the
Lower East Side, because they wanted to take away as
much fodder as they could, you know, as much of
the you know, the argument that the anti immigration folks
were using.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
So I've written about Thomas Nast before. It was the
famous cartoonist who just lampooned people, including Boss Tweet with
Tammany Hall, with these cartoons oftentimes targeting immigrants, specifically Irish immigrants,
and they're sort of these caricatures of Irish people just
sort of slovenly and ruining. He was a nativist, clearly
(22:49):
and ruining New York City. So how were the Jewish gangsters,
I guess, or you know, the folks in the Lower
East Side versus the German Jewish folks, how were they
to picked it in the media or how how did
they fit into the media.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
It was all of that. It was the same kind
of things. Jews are all gamblers. That's why they that's
why they like the stock market, you know, so much,
because they're gamblers. They're they're you know, inherently a moral
people who we should not consider part of the Protestant,
lily white, blue blood future that we see for the US.
(23:28):
And information about Jewish crime was wonderful for them. It
was always saleable. It was just great stuff. And so
you can kind of feel what those German Jews might
have felt like, we got to get rid of this. Meanwhile,
it was it was a tough proposition because the German
(23:49):
Jews were trying to have obviously the best relationship that
they could with the co religionist downtown, despite the fact
they come from different backgrounds, like, these are our people.
We want to elevate these people. And so in addition
to trying to get rid of the underworld, the German
Jews provided a ton of philanthropy. They built free hospitals,
(24:13):
free education. They had pasteurized milk depots where women could
go get pasteurized milk for free, which then eliminated the
typhoid problem. I mean, they had free matza giveaways on passover,
free shoes in the winter time, there were a number
of things they were doing that were much less controversial,
(24:34):
but when it comes to eliminating crime, it's obviously more
controversial because you're going to get kickback from folks who say,
why are you coming down here and calling to sell criminals?
Why are you painting us with the same brush that
all the anti Semites want. So it was the crime
fight begins secretively a little bit for that reason, and
(24:55):
then it becomes eventually more of a public thing.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
I'm not sure where we are local politics in nineteen twelve,
what we're talking about, but I know that Tammany you know,
the Democrats whilst tweet they pandered to the immigrants which
were voting in mass for them, because they were saying,
we're here for you. Was that the situation or was
there anybody on the side of Jewish immigrants, either the
(25:19):
wealthy or the not wealthy.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Yes, So, when the German Jews are trying to make
their moves and trying to elevate the downtowners and massage
the relationship as much as they can, one of the
competitors to them was Tammany Hall. Because Tammany Hall was
trying to do a similar thing. But in a different way.
(25:41):
They were also trying to cater to the immigrant masses
because their votes were valuable, and one of the ways
you could cater to them is by making sure they
got out of prison when they committed a crime. I mean,
that's a bit of a simplification, but not really. And
so that was another hurdle that the reformers needed needed
(26:02):
to get over.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
It's so interesting because, you know, Boss Tweed was perhaps
the most corrupted politician of that time period, but he
started so many social programs specifically to get votes, you know,
and it's so odd to think of that dynamic, somebody
who could be so corrupt, But at the same time
his corruption is beneficial to some of the really disenfranchised
(26:24):
people in New York in that time period.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
And Tammany also winds up supporting the movement for labor
laws that becomes sort of the kernel of the modern
day Democratic Party. Not that there's not a ton of
corruption in both parties, but it is interesting to think
that our modern Democratic party really does start with Tammany Hall.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
So where do we start now, So we've got the
German Jewish folks kind of you know, trying to reform,
So tell me more about who they recruit, who who
is the person that they bring in that they try
that are trying to change. How can you do that
when it's obviously such a systemic issue where they live
and how they're treated in general in the way that
(27:06):
they're reacting as refugees yees.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
So the person that they bring in is a young
man named Abe Schoenfeld. I was talking about him a
bit earlier. He's the son of a reformer. He is
embarrassed and ashamed by the crime in his neighborhood among
his people. He's also, by the young age of twenty one,
(27:29):
he's already lost many of his friends to the underworld
into crime, and he is really motivated to do essentially
what the German Jews uptown also want to do, but
his reasons are maybe a little bit more personal, and
he's growing up in a really interesting time. He's born
(27:50):
in eighteen ninety one, and by the early nineteen hundreds,
nineteen oh five, oh six, oh seven, eight, those years,
the reformers uptown, the wealthy people who want to eliminate
the underworld, want to reform the criminal underworld. They are
hiring people like a young folks who are from the ghetto,
(28:11):
to produce research about the underworld, to write pamphlets and
articles and research reports about sex work, about the gambling problem,
about the horse poisoners, and all of these things. So
Abe drops out of high school as a freshman. He
(28:32):
was a freshman at Stuyvesant High and interestingly, the reason
that he dropped out is not because he was like
a bad student. He was actually one of the best students.
There was an interesting around nineteen oh six that was
the Eastern European Jewish immigration peaked the Principles that the
schools of Manhattan got together and said, we have to
(28:52):
cut down our ranks because we have too many kids.
So one of the solutions they came up with was
just to advise their top students to leave, basically saying
that if you stay, we just don't think you're going
to learn much because the pace of learning is going
to be slowed down so much. So Abe was one
of those people who was called in and they said, look,
(29:15):
if you have a career in mind, something you want
to go pursue, this would be a fine time to
go and do it. And he did. He had a
dad who was a reformer, and he wanted to follow
in that path and see if his sort of generation
could maybe have more success than his father's generation had.
(29:35):
So he spends you know, he's fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen
years old and he's going around the Lower East Side.
He's interviewing sex workers, he's producing reports, he's getting paid
by the uptowners. Is almost like a freelance reporter type.
And then the summer of nineteen twelve comes along and
(29:55):
by now Abe is twenty one years old and he's
already jaded about this whole reform project because he's been
producing all this writing and research, but it hasn't achieved anything.
And he sees how it's often used in the end,
which is to get a headline in a newspaper or
to elect a certain politician. But they call him in
(30:17):
after the murder of the gambler in the summer of
nineteen twelve, they call a Bin and they say, look,
we want to get more aggressive. Do you think you
can help? And so that's when Abe's story really begins,
and they want him to start with the gamblers. They say, okay,
(30:39):
how can we make effective inroads to eliminate the gambling problem?
Because they were like casinos all over the city, but
particularly Lower East Side, and he said, well, you need
to find the name of the cop and the NYPD
who takes the monthly payments from the gamblers. In the
same way that the pimps had their own sort of corporation,
(31:01):
their own fraternity, the guys in the gambling arena also
had their own association. And so I said, well, you
need to find the name of the cop who gets
the payment. And they said, okay, can you do that?
And over the next few months he sort of against
the odds, has success with that. And when he has
(31:22):
success with that, the Mayor of New York, who is
a really fascinating figure, he sees what they're doing, what
the German Jews have done with this young kid, and
they say, hey, what if we install this kid in
the NYPD, will let him choose the cops that he
wants to work with, because he knows who's corrupted, who
(31:42):
takes money, and who doesn't. They can go around the
neighborhood and maybe eventually around around the city and shut down,
you know, whatever he thinks he is shutting down. And
it's just an enormous amount of power and responsibility to
put into the hands of any but particularly a twenty
one year old. So that was like the kernel of
(32:05):
the story. That was what I initially discovered in research
back in about twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, and it was
just a really compelling footnote to start with. I thought,
who was this guy? What did he actually do? And
that's what set me on the path to writing the book.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
This initially even must have been very, very dangerous though
for Abe, because he's from that neighborhood. He's going around
all of a sudden asking questions when he was once
in school and now he's really you know, asking I'm
assuming not dumb enough to drop things down right in
front of people. But then you're moving forward and he's
trying to figure out, you know, who the cop is,
(32:48):
and then he'll be installed there. He's straddling to worlds,
both of which could have been dangerous on either side.
You know, having money can make you dangerous. Maybe he
knew too much, so I assume I think a lot
of well not a lot of your sources, but I
know one of your sources was Abe. Is that right?
He did some writing on this.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Yeah. Abe had written an unpublished memoir that he started
in the late nineteen twenties, and he worked on an
audit off for the next fifty years. And when he
died in nineteen seventy seven, he had about a dozen
different drafts of this memoir that were in his papers,
(33:30):
and the papers were all inherited by a niece of his,
actually a grand niece who had kind of been like
a daughter to him because he never had a kid
of his own. So the grand niece inherited these papers,
and forty years later, when her husband wanted the space
in their home back, the niece donates the papers to
(33:52):
a research institution in New York, and that's how I
was able to see them. But that memoir was a
huge source source of information. One of the interesting things
about the memoir was that it was not his entire
life that he was trying to cover, even though he
did amazing things in the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties
(34:14):
as well, he moved on to a whole new field.
But when he looked back on his life, he thought
the most interesting and unique thing was this crime fight
that I was involved in for several years on the
Lower East Side. So the memoir was a couple hundred
pages long, and it was all about this one five
to ten year span of time.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
So he at age twenty one, is then, you know,
recruited essentially to be in the NYPD and create his
own squad. Tell me about what happens moving forward. Where
does the twenty one year old start with reforming you know,
the Jewish gangsters in the Lower east Side to please
the you know, Upper West Side. I presumed Jewish folks
(34:54):
from Germany and the mayor who has now hired him.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
It's super person for him. He's from the neighborhood. He's
grown up just surrounded by all of this stuff, so
he knows, he knows everything about He's been a researcher
for sort of like an underworld researcher for several years.
He really knows where all the bodies are buried, so
(35:19):
to speak. And he's been kind of dreaming for years
about this kind of opportunity and what he might do.
He's been talking about it with his dad for years.
So he does come in surprisingly with the ideas and
with an agenda for how they need to go about
(35:41):
wiping out the Jewish underworld. And so the way that
it happens is they go kind of phase by phase.
So it starts with gamblers and the sex work industry,
moves on to the Yiddish horse poisoners and the gangsters.
The Jewish gangsters were working actually for the garment industry
(36:02):
and for the garment unions specifically because there was this,
like I said, there weren't any labor laws, and so
the Jewish unions on the Lower East Side became more
and more radical and aggressive over the years as they're
responding to all this injustice in the labor field, and
(36:23):
they had finally resorted to hiring the gangs to go
and attack the manufacturers and the factories. So when there
was a strike on when there was a labor strike on,
of course you have manufacturers that are going to go
and hire scout workers to get around the strike. And
in the past the unions hadn't had any way to
(36:45):
sort of to control that. And so once we move
into nineteen oh nine, nineteen ten, nineteen eleven, these years,
you have these unions who are basically forming an army,
and so that became another app yet yet another aspect
of the larger picture of you know, the underworld and
what Abe needed to go after.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Well, how do you go after that entire industry sex
work and the garments and you know, and working with
grocers and poisoning horses and everything. How do you, one
by one, how do you take these you know, systemic
issues down.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
So that's a great question, and it kind of gets
to the heart of everything. The way Abe approached it
was that you have to sever the tie between the
underworld and the overworld. So in any given facet of
the underworld, there's a point there's a cop taking money,
there's a politician supporting the cop, or a politician supporting
(37:45):
the lead pimp or whatever, and you need to expose
the connection and sever it. And so that was part
of the strategy.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
What does he think is the biggest emergency, the largest
fire to put out? First? Did you say it was
the sex work first? I can't remember.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
I would say it was it was sex work. That
was the thing that had been portrayed really really in
the national and the international news as being what the
Jews are about. It was the way you smear the
Lower East Side is talking about all the sex work.
And it was also just a lot of shame. It
was like, look at these people, you know, they don't
(38:23):
even care. They just sell their daughters on the street
and all of this stuff. The girl Abe and fall
in love with as a teenager had left him and
gone back to the streets as a sex worker. So
for Abe, this was that was extremely personal. So, you know,
they go after the sex work industry. That's in the
(38:44):
Winner of nineteen thirteen, and then they sort of move on.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
So who's the enabler and the government with sex work?
Is it a particular cop or a politician who would
even you know, keep an eye on that.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Well, so it was a gigantic industry that was generating
a lot of money, and there were there were two
figures in the sex work industry. There was the head
of what I referred to earlier sort of the Corporation
of Pips by the way. Their official title was the
(39:16):
Independent Benevolent Association, the IBA, that's what that's what they
called themselves. And they had kind of this president figure
who was like the king pimp. And there was also
a woman who was the largest brothel owner on the
Lower East Side. And so those were two really important
(39:37):
figures who were responsible for funneling all of this, all
this money up up to the cops. The way that
they approached the sex industry was by it was more
boots on the ground raiding the brothels. So it was
brothel raid after brothel raid, and that's the way the
(39:59):
casinos were managed as as well. And eventually, you know,
you tried to have a situation that just made it
impossible for folks to make money the way that they
had been used to making money.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
I mean, could they just pick up and move to
New Jersey? Some did that, well, I understand New Jersey,
but would there be I mean that would this not
continue in a different borough? Would you then be able
to target different boroughs or were their jurisdictions where you
just Abe couldn't reach out past Lower East Side.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
There was a lot of reaching out and there whenever
the reaching out sort of the expansion would happen, there'd
be some pushback against the expansion. But Abe and the
Incorruptible Squad, they would go to Coney Island. They did
work in New Jersey a little bit. They would go
to other parts of Manhattan, but yeah, you couldn't. Obviously,
(40:51):
they were trying to clean up their neighborhood. That was
the mandate. And it does become a whack a mole
thing where you can eliminate it, and it pops up elsewhere.
I think it's really one of the interesting things to
know is that all the conventional wisdom we have today
about how vice works and how anti vice laws work.
(41:14):
For instance, we know today you can have laws against narcotics,
but those laws are going to have nothing to do
with the demand for narcotics. The demand remains, and it
gets supplied in a new, more dangerous way by marginalized
people who are willing to take the risk. That sort
of wisdom didn't exist back then because there had been
(41:34):
really no anti vice laws. One of the important political
movements that's happening in the background of the story is
this movement against vice itself, and the very first laws
against vice are just starting to come into existence. For instance,
up until about nineteen ten, you can walk into your
corner pharmacy and by pretty much any narcotic you could
(41:59):
think of, you know, opium and heroin would be sold
a dozen different ways, you know, into it's like like
a dispensary today, but more so. And then these anti
drug laws start to come into being, first of the
state level than at the federal level. The first anti
sex work law comes into being in nineteen ten. That's
(42:22):
the Man Act, which we still have today. So these
things were just starting to exist, and it was the
anti vice movement. Obviously that kind of helps Abe do
what he ends up doing because he has this legal
power now behind him as well.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
Does AB's job with NYPD and leading this squad. Does
it stretch into prohibition time period?
Speaker 2 (42:45):
It stretches into the very earliest months of prohibission nineteen
eighteen nineteen nineteen, before it's really even officially taken effect.
And by then Abe is now ten years older, he's
(43:07):
thirty years old. He's starting to look back and he's like, Oh,
all these laws that we had once cheered on that
helped us clean our neighborhoods were now going to be
bad for society because he'd seen how when you move
the law from the local or the state level to
(43:29):
the federal level, it just becomes a law enforcement industry
that's going to feed on itself. So again, this is
conventional wisdom we have today, but Abe sort of learned
this in real time, and he kind of learned it
the hard way, and in a way, I think he
regretted having been part of that movement.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
If we go back to when the first few years
where he's doing this as kind of a practical matter,
he's eliminating a lot of jobs. I mean, he's shutting
down gambling and sex work and I'm sure raising hell
in the gormt industry too. So is there a negative
to what's happening and let's take out the morals and
(44:12):
the hurt that comes with all of these industries. Are
we leaving people unemployed at this point? Or again, it
sounds like a vast amount of people it's going to
affect in the Lower East Side.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
It's that's more of a personal view. I guess every
you know, reader of the book is going to walk
away with a different view on that. It depends, you know,
do you feel that sex work should be free and
clear and uninhibited. Do you feel that gambling should be open?
But those were those were multimillion dollar industries, and that's
(44:43):
multi million in nineteen twelve. You have to multiply multimillion
by about twenty five to get them to get the
modern day dollars. So yeah, he was putting a ton
of people out of a job. And the fact that
he didn't get killed, I mean, the fact that that
he ended up living through. This was one I think
of the great miracles of the story.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
To eighty seven. I was trying to do the math.
I mean, I think that's Howlid he was. So it
just seems like for somebody with a normal life, you know,
living through the early nineteen hundreds seems you know, pretty
impressive to begin with. So is that what he would
consider looking back, even though I know you say that
he probably had some regrets about some of this. Is
(45:26):
that his heyday then nineteen twelve two or nineteen ten,
whenever he started, until you know, the eighteen nineteen, eighteen,
nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
I think it was his heyday. And I think as
he got older and aged through the twentieth century, he
looked back on that time period with it with a
special fondness and a pride because he could see how
it was getting forgotten. He could see how all these
incredible events of the twentieth century that he himself was
(45:56):
living through with just eclipsing knowledge about what happened in
the US prior to World War One. You know, I
think there's a reason that historians call the First World
War the comma of the twentieth century. It's that point
on which everything turns and the world was just totally different.
Up until nineteen thirteen, it was one thing, and then
(46:20):
nineteen fourteen fifteen comes along and we move into a
totally different era. And on top of that, the story
that he himself was involved in was also itself secretive
when it was going on. So I think that's maybe
where the impetus for this memoir came is, I have
to put this down somewhere. It was secretive when it
(46:41):
happened and kind of later buried by later events.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
Tell me what you think the impact was. Can you
paint a picture me. I think we had a pretty
clear picture of the Lower east Side and certainly people
living in poverty, and as you said, sixteen hundred people
crammed into one block. After he has done effectively with
you know, this sort of this really big sweep and
trying to achieve what he has in his head is
(47:07):
for the better of his people in the Lower east Side,
What does lower the Lower east Side look like when
he's done?
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Lower east Side looks much different. There is still crime,
there's still vice, of course that didn't go away, but
the neighborhood itself had definitely been elevated. You had people
moving uptown more and more out of the ghetto. So
it did have a big impact at the time. Interestingly,
(47:36):
Abe was never satisfied though, And that was another lesson
to be taken away from these sort of anti vice missions,
that that that would come to define the century. That
once you become a revolutionary against vice, and once once
you become a moral revolutionary, just like other kinds of revolution,
(48:00):
it's hard to know when to stop. You get your gains,
but you want more, and you want more. And Abe
himself was a young man when this was going on,
full of to some extent, full of piss and vinegar
and and and he wanted it to keep going. He
was he was begging these German Jewish uptowners, just give
me another, give me another twenty five thousand dollars, I
(48:22):
can run, you know, the alcohol out of the neighborhood.
You know, up until the very end, he wanted it
to continue and continue. And so that was that was
an interesting part of the story as well.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
So did he feel like he ever got the acknowledgment
that he should have gotten or could have gotten. I
know you said this was a secretive operation and dangerous.
I know you also said that he wrote this memoir
as a I got to get on the page before
I die, so somebody knows something. Was he left fairly satisfied,
though I know he's tinkering. But is he left like
with the feeling like I could I could finally sort
(48:56):
of move to what you had said would be a
new career for him.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
I think think by and large, Abe didn't care about
the credit, but he was still a human being who
had an ego, and he did feel that because of
the nature of what they were doing, in the secrecy
of it, that these other folks who ran crime crusades
(49:20):
later later in the century had gone down in history
books for doing things that were nearly as impressive as
what he had done. So I think there was there
was a little bit of that, But Abe went on
to just have this incredible career that you could not
make up. Because what happens is, you know, the nineteen
(49:41):
thirties arrived, which is this ugly, ugly period in American
history where Nazism and bigotry is seeping into American culture
and American thinking in a way that we don't really
acknowledge today. And by the late nineteen thirties or even
(50:04):
a little bit earlier than the late nineteen thirties, there
was a very real concern about all these state side
kind of Nazi organizations that were It was a lot
of white supremacists and KKK types coalescing into sort of
Nazi type type organizations, and there was a big movement
(50:26):
to recruit spies who could kind of root this stuff out.
And I believe the number that I've seen is that
approximately eight thousand people during the late thirties and into
the forties, about eight thousand Americans worked as spies here
(50:47):
at home to try to infiltrate these what we could
call white supremacist organizations. And Abe was again part part
of that, and that was a job that he had
for I think he signs onto that in nineteen thirty
eight and I think he retires from that in nineteen
(51:09):
sixty four.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
So that was really the bulk of his life was
fighting anti Semitism, begatry racism at home.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
So you're talking about a Jewish man from Eastern Europe
who's embedded with white supremacists here in America.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
Yeah. So he would have been the son of Hungarian
Jewish immigrants. He was born in the Lower East Side,
born in America. But yeah, he was a prolific spy,
which is really what he started out as when you
think about it, he was kind of a spy of
on a much more local level. He's a spy of
(51:46):
the underworld, trying to report to the folks with the money.
What is what? And that's really what he did with
the neo Nazis or whatever we want to call him.
Speaker 1 (51:57):
Did some very brave woman end up mary him and
having kids with him, knowing what what the hell he
gets into?
Speaker 2 (52:04):
He did get married a little bit later in life.
I mean it was especially for that time period, it
would have been considered late. I think he got married
to he's in this late thirties, to a woman named
Annie Evans, and they never had kids. They lived on
Central Park South for decades and they never had kids.
And she died in the late sixties and he died
in the late seventies.
Speaker 1 (52:25):
Now, we did not end up getting to I think
your other characters, right, did we even talk about your
great gats We didn't talk about Arnold at all, Rostein
or the woman.
Speaker 2 (52:35):
The young woman. Her name is Antonia Rolnick. Her underworld
nickname was Tony the tough. Yes, and she to me
is is you know, one of the most or the
most compelling figure in the story. She has not been
written about before. She's not a famous criminal of the
(52:56):
Lower east Side. She was someone that emerged from my research.
She came out of the archives. She had been written
about by Abe as he had fallen in love with her.
She was a pretty classic immigrant. She came here from
the pale of settlement when she was thirteen. Like other
(53:17):
junior high age people, especially the girls. She left school
in seventh or eighth grade and worked in the garment industry.
That was grueling. Didn't last for long, and she gets
lured into sex work, and that's kind of when her
story really picks up. Abe falls in love with her,
(53:39):
she leaves him. They later hook up again as essentially
partners in the crime fighting business. But Antonia Tony the tough,
She kind of goes back and forth throughout the story,
crossing the line from the underworld to the overworld, and
her her journey was very emblematic of the experiences of
(54:03):
young women on the Lower east Side. The types of
young women on the Lower east Side that we have
heard about before are usually these really exceptional ones who
were at the head of the labor movement and who
put their life on the line and the strikes, the
Clara Lemlicks and the people the people like that, taking
nothing away from them. They're amazing young women. But my
(54:27):
research seemed to indicate that most of the young women
on the Lower East Side that was not their experience.
Their experiences were more of a complicated one. So yeah,
Tony is an amazing figure. Arnold Rothstein is important to
the book because he helps us understand the implications of
(54:53):
trying to fight vice. So Abe is off, on the
one hand, going to war with the underworld, using the
the new anti vice laws to their maximum effect. And
what we see happen is as these anti vice laws
come into being, a new industry is created, because, as
we say, the demand doesn't go away. So Arnold Rostein
(55:15):
had become expert at trying to find the opportunities, finding
the opportunities in the anti vice laws. So as Abe
is going to war with the underworld, Arnold is capitalizing
on it. So those a in a nutshell, Abe, Antonia, Arnold,
(55:37):
the three A's. Those are the three main figures in
the book. There are many other figures in the book,
but those are those are the three who we kind
of follow from the beginning to the end.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
I sometimes get asked, why are you telling this story
right now? Like why is it relevant right now? So
why would this story resonate with readers in twenty twenty five?
Speaker 2 (55:57):
Well, I don't know. Over the weekend we had millions
of people marching because immigrants were being villainized, and there
that seems to be a just a perennium for us.
I'm not saying that this particular period was the beginning
of that. The nativist movement obviously goes back much much further,
(56:19):
but we do see an incredible example of it, and
we see something happen that wouldn't I don't think happened today.
But maybe we can learn from it, which is about
local politics and trying to improve your own neighborhood. Focus
(56:41):
on what is going on in your backyard and how
can we improve our neighborhood. While I was working on
the book, I often thought, would any of this happened today?
Would you have wealthy people who have an interest in
the ghetto try to wage a war on the underworld.
Maybe it does happen in some ways, you just don't
(57:02):
hear about it. The other reason I think it may
be relevant or resonance today is because we now do
take for granted all these anti vice laws that we have,
and I know that a lot of people feel negatively
about them. A lot of people feel that the whole purpose,
or at least the effect of the war on drugs
(57:24):
is to warehouse black and brown bodies in a prison.
An extremely compelling and persuisive argument can be made on
behalf of that viewpoint. The story I'm telling is the
origins of that larger story.
Speaker 1 (57:52):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners, All About the
Ghost Club, All that Is Wicked, American Sherlock, and Don't
Forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime
podcast Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.
(58:12):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis Amerosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer.
Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff,
and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook
(58:34):
at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more.
And if you know of a historical crime that could
use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked,
email us at info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com. We'll
also take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words.
Speaker 2 (59:00):
E
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
You have to sever the tie between the underworld and
the overworld, and you need to expose the connection and
sever it, and so that was part of the strategy.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:53):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. New York and the early
nineteen hundreds was filled with people trying to make their
(01:14):
lives better, but for many, the rise of organized crime
kept them in constant fear. On the Lower East Side,
Jewish criminals from Eastern Europe formed crime syndicates. There were
gangs of horse poisoners, casino owners, thieves, and thugs, but
then a group of Jewish uptowners stepped in and created
a vice squad that worked in secrecy. Author Dan Slater
(01:37):
tells us the story from his book The Incorruptibles set
the scene for me for where we are and what
New York City is like during this time period.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Well, we are in the New York City of the
late eighteen hundreds, and it is a time when there's
a lot of immigration from many parts of the world.
By there's a lot of immigration from Eastern Europe. You
have a lot of Jewish refugees streaming in from Eastern Europe,
Russia and the surrounding areas, and they're fleeing a lot
(02:13):
of massacres. They're fleeing centuries of severe Prussian and they
are coming to New York, which in the eighteen eighties
and eighteen nineties is legally considered kind of wide open.
There are really very few laws or regulations that are
limiting vice and crime. And they are the marginalized folks,
(02:37):
and so they find themselves being drawn into the underworld.
And that's kind of where we are when the book
opens up.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
I feel like when a vasta, when there's a wave
of immigrants who come into New York in that time
period and maybe a little bit later. Is that when
they sort of take over, Like when the Irish first arrived,
that's when we see the Irish mall. When the Italians
first arrive, is that when we see the mafias. I
don't know if that's right or not, but it just
seems like there's turf wars when a new group that
(03:08):
could dominate comes in.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I would say, yes, yes, and no, I don't think
America or New York for it. You know, New York
or the rest of the country had seen organized vice
in the way that the Jews brought it in. And
that's partly because they had been organizing vice at that
point for centuries, going back to the money lending days,
(03:34):
and they understood how to organize an underworld economy in
a way that other ethnicities ever had before. And so
that's why the subtitle of my book has the words
the Birth of the American Underworld, because part of the
argument that I'm making is that it really starts here
with these folks and not with the Italians, which was
(03:57):
the impression that I had grown up with. I mean,
I was I was born in the you know, the
late nineteen seventies, and I grew up with sort of
the Martin Scorsese stuff and all of that, and I
just figured organized crime, the mafia. Everybody knows that. And
I think part of my motivation to do this book
(04:20):
was the discovery that, hey, it actually began at an
earlier point with a whole other group of people, and
it was a story it seems like, was kind of lost.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
When your characters come in, and you can tell me
if that's the you know, nineteen tens or twenties, when
they come in, what is the geography like for the
people who are running these different factions? Where are people located? Where?
You know New Yorkers? While I lived in New York
for ten years, what would I recognize now as these
locations of where each kind of where the groups were.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
So you have the Eastern European Jewish refugees amassing mainly
in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which by about
nineteen oh seven nineteen oh eight was the most densely
packed urban area in the world. It had surpassed Bombay,
India for that title, Bombay being the modern day Mumbai.
(05:14):
What did that mean in terms of numbers? There were
as many as sixteen hundred people living on a single
square block in the lower East Side. There was a
lot of people, there were a lot of density, There
weren't a lot of opportunities. It was a ghetto and
it was a place that was populated by the people
(05:36):
who had really invented the ghetto, you know. The ghetto
is a term that goes back to Venice. It originates
in the early fifteen hundreds when a bunch of Jewish
refugees again show up in Venice in like fifteen oh nine,
and the people of Venice are divided over what to
do with these folks. The religious people in Venice want
(05:58):
the Jews gone, and the more secular people in Venice,
the people in the government say, hey, wait, they can
be useful as money lenders and as garment manufacturers, and
so let's figure out a way to keep them. And
the solution they came up with was to take an
island called the ghetto. It was called the ghetto because
(06:19):
it had been a copper foundry, and ghetto is derived
from gaeta, which means to throw or to cast. And
they said, well, put them all in the ghetto and
during the day they can come on to the main
part of Venice to do their jobs and then at
night they'll go back. And that's where the word literally
(06:43):
comes from. And so these were people who had been
ghetto eyes marginalized for like I said, centuries. And so
by the time they get to New York in the
early nineteen in the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds,
this is not a strange state of affairs for them
necessarily to be living in kind of the worst part
(07:04):
of town, to not have a lot of things available
to them that other people that other people.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Might So the Lower East Side was that considered a
melting pot or was it very clearly segregated based on
you know, the immigrants who were there were these sixteen
hundred people in one block, all you know, Jewish refugees
or from Eastern Europe.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Mainly, but there were lots of other folks mixed in.
But yes, in the main it was a Jewish ghetto.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
So your main players and where that kind of action starts, Well,
are we through the origin story of how these people
ended up here or do we need to continue on
in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds before we
get kind of to the meat of the story.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah, So the main players in the book, I would
say two of them are products of the immag that
we're talking about, and one of them is a product
of immigration, but from a slightly earlier period. They are
all Jewish, Two of them are pretty young, one of
(08:12):
them is a little bit older.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Are these folks your main players people who in Eastern
Europe had played similar roles? I mean, were these always
sort of people who were involved in crime or is
this a new thing that's that they're adapting to in
New York.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
The individuals themselves had not been involved in crime in
Eastern Europe, but their ancestors definitely had been.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
So tell me where we start here with this group.
Do we talk about him as a group or do
you want to talk about them as individual people.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
There are two characters who cross paths with each other,
and then there's a third character who is kind of
separate from that. We have a crime fighter who's a
young man who wants to reform the Lower east Side.
He is the son of Eastern European refugees born in
(09:08):
the Lower east Side, and he is the child of reformers.
He has a father who's a pretty well known reformer
who is always trying to improve the Neighborhood improve Society,
trying to get more labor rights for the Jews in
the Lower east Side, trying to eliminate the prostitution in
the Lower east Side. So this figure was sort of
(09:30):
raised in that environment. There's a young woman who is
herself a refugee. She comes over as a child, and
we see her get lured into the underworld and then
later recruited over to the cause of attempting to eliminate
the underworld. And then third, we have a figure who
(09:54):
is one of the main figures in the book who
is sort of more known to history. His name is
is Arnold Rothstein, and some people will know that name immediately.
Many of these days, I'm finding do not know his
name anymore. But if you've ever read The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, you have gotten a little bit
of a taste of Arnold Rosstein, because there is a
(10:17):
figure in Gatsby who is based directly on Rostein, and
that's the character in the novel who is supposed to
have sort of trained Gatsby and given him his initial opportunities.
One of the best places to really start the stories
(10:39):
in the summer of nineteen twelve. That's not when the
book itself begins, but it's when the story really starts
to pick up steam. And by the summer of nineteen twelve,
Jewish crime had been a running problem for many years.
It had been a source of embarrassment to some people
(11:01):
on the Lower east Side, who fashioned themselves reformers, but
it had also been a source of embarrassment to the
other group of Jewish people who were living in Manhattan
at the time, and those were the German Jews who
were living uptown, largely in the Upper east Side, in
big mansions. And these were folks who had come to
America a generation chou before the Russians, and they had
(11:26):
famously done very well. Here. We know many of their
names because those names still adorn important institutions Lehmann, Solomon,
the Guggenheims, etc. And they're looking downtown and right at
the moment when they figure, Okay, we've kind of assimilated,
we've become successful beyond our wildness. Dreams were on the
(11:49):
verge of being accepted by the Protestants, the blue Bloods,
the Yankees, and now here come these co religionous of
ours who we really don't know, but that are connected
to us religion, and they're from a totally different place.
They're from this kind of backwater. They lack education, they
lack language abilities, and they're streaming into the ghetto and
(12:11):
they're making the ghetto what the ghetto is known for,
which is tough living and a lot of crime. And
so these uptowners wanted to eliminate the underworld as well,
and they never really knew how to do it. The
first decade or so of the nineteen hundreds, they made attempts.
Those attempts would often blow back in their face. And
(12:31):
so here comes the summer of nineteen twelve, and it's
going to really push them to do something beyond what
they had tried before. And the reason was is that
that summer there was a gambler who was murdered outside
of hotel in Times Square. And the murder, it was
a murder of a gambler, It was a murder of
(12:51):
a Jewish gambler, and the murder generated a lot of
publicity for various reasons. One of the reasons was that
they're was a cop who allegedly had ordered the murder.
And so this was a murder that you know, the
folks involved in the murder might have thought that this
is not going to get any attention. It's just one
of many murders that happens every day in the city.
(13:14):
But it ended up being on front pages for the
next three years because of its interesting circumstances. And so
these uptowners are now saying, we have to do something.
And that's when they say, all right, we have found
this young man from the Lower east Side who raised
(13:35):
on the Lower east Side, raised among the underworld. His
father was a reformer who had tried himself to do
various things to eliminate the underworld. This is a young
guy who's very motivated. We need to tap him and
get in touch with him, and they recruit him to
lead what becomes eventually a war on the underworlds. So
(14:00):
to put it in sort of pop culture terms that
people may be more familiar with, it's like a little
bit like the elliot Ness story The Untouchables. I didn't
call the book The Incorruptibles because it sounds similar to
The Untouchables. I called it The Incorruptibles because this young
man is eventually moved into the NYPD and they give
(14:22):
him his own squad of cops, and this squad becomes
known as the Incorruptibles. So that's where the title of
the book comes from, and that's really how my story begins.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Before we get to the story, let's go back. What
was the motivation for Jewish people from Germany to come
to the United States. It must have been business opportunities
or or what was it.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
It was a it was a number of things. The
German Jews had not experienced oppression like the Eastern Europeans had,
but it was still it was. That was not to
say that life was good in any any Semitism free
in Germany. It was. It was bad. But there had
been a Jewish enlightenment in the late seventeen hundreds there
(15:06):
in Germany, and life had vastly improved over the next
thirty or forty years, but it was there was still there,
you know, still oppression. And then there's all this opportunity
that's rumored to exist in the US. And there were
a lot of Germans who were coming to the States
(15:28):
and they were writing these travel guides, publishing these books
that would get published back in Germany. So people in
Germany were reading these books about all the opportunity that
you know existed, and so that was partly responsible for
the German Jewish immigration, and they mainly came over in
the eighteen forties. There were about forty thousand of them
that arrived in the eighteen forties, and by the sixties, seventies,
(15:53):
and eighties many of them had moved to Wall Street
and were very successful there.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
When we talk about Jewish crime, what does that mean?
Does that mean that the people who are causing crime around,
you know, across the city or mainly Lower East Side
come from the Jewish people who came from Eastern Europe
and they're the origin or they're you know, some of
the biggest movers in the crime world. Or is it
literally Jewish on Jewish crime.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
It's a lot of Jewish on Jewish crime. Very interesting
and disturbing. Example of that were the Yiddish horse poisoners.
This was a gang that made their money by extorting
business owners in the neighborhood who relied on horses to
get their products around. Some of the most vulnerable were
(16:38):
people who sold the perishable item. If you sold ice
cream or if you sold produce, you know, you needed
your horses ready to get that product to the customer
in a timely fashion. And so the Yiddish horse poisoners
would go around extorting these, you know, business owners, if
you don't pay us a certain amount of money every
(16:59):
month to poison your horses, and these guys were terrifying,
and if you didn't pay up, they came through. They
did what they said that they were going to do.
Most of the sex work on the Lower East Side,
which there was a ton of, that was mainly all
within the community. So the crazy thing about sex work
(17:20):
within the Jewish community was that it was highly organized.
And that's an important thing to understand because it affects
the rest of the story. There was an actual corporation
of pimps. They had filed in corporation papers and a
corporate constitution in Albany under New York state law. And
(17:46):
they would gather at a cafe at ninety two Second
Avenue to do business with each other, to network, to
pull their money to pay off the cops every month.
And they would also be involved in the recruiting of
sex workers, which happened all over the city. You'd go
to restaurants look for waitresses, you'd go up to the
(18:12):
departments tours like Macy's and look for the people who
worked as the shop girls. So yeah, there was a
lot of sex work on the Lower east Side. It
was very organized and like I said, it catered to
both Lower East Siders themselves and also even to people
who visited city.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I don't know if you've ever read one of these,
but for a book that I did that was set
in New York in the eighteen seventies, they had published
these small books that men could buy for I don't
know how much, a few books, which would have been
a lot of money then. And it was literally like
a menu of where to go, what brothels to go.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
The passwords that you need to get into them, yes.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
And recommendations in certain houses. And it varied from block
to block. Especially, you know, my area was the Irving
Plaza Irving Place area, and so it was like block
to block you could have a five star place or
it would be a one star.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
I think the important thing to know about well about
sex work in general, but particularly sex work as it
pertains to the Lower East Side, was that during this
time period, prior to the you know, the labor laws
that we have now and take for granted now, there
were no labor protections at all. So the garbage industry
(19:33):
was based in the Lower East Side. It was a
Jewish industry. There were Italian women who worked in it.
There were women from other ethnicities who worked in it,
but by and large it was a Jewish thing. There
were these factories, there were these sweatshops all over the
Lower east Side, and there was no minimum wage, there
was no cap on hours worked, there were no safety regulations,
(19:56):
there was nothing. So for a lot of these young
women who were coming in, you know, as the immigrants,
the decision was kind of stark. It was like, we
can work in these factories and here's what that looks like,
or there's sex work.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Was there a hierarchy with the different sort of I
don't know if you call them families or groups or
what you would say. I'm so used to families because
of course the Godfather and stuff. Was there a hierarchy?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
There weren't Jewish organized crime families per se. Yeah, you
didn't see that tradition, the sort of the kind of
handed down the way we associated with the Italians, because
you have a lot of families that were divided. You know,
internally you'd have sort of the black sheep off doing
(20:46):
his or earth thing. But then you had folks who
might be reformers as well.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Well, let's start with the story now. You had said that,
you know, was it the summer of nineteen twelve that
a gangster was murdered in Times Square? And that's kind
of what the ball rolling with the people who came
from Germany, who said, we've got to get a hold
of this because they're giving us a bad name or
giving us too much attention or whatever.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
And I think the other is because I think it's
important to establish the motivations of why did these wealthy
uptowners feel the need to intervene. It was definitely bad name.
They felt they'd worked for decades to be accepted and
to assimilate, and they felt that their chances of being
accepted were now diminished. But these folks also really believed,
(21:32):
I think in the Promise of America. They believed in
open borders. It had been the thing that benefited then
and they didn't want to see that go away. Meanwhile,
there was this big anti immigration movement that had begun
in the eighteen nineties and by nineteen twelve was beginning
(21:52):
to gain some steam, and the anti immigration folks they
wanted to shut down the borders. They wanted to stop
immigration entirely. They wanted eugenics to play a role in
the siding who could have a baby, all that stuff.
And so the German Jews defined themselves partly in opposition
to this anti immigration movement. And that was another reason
(22:15):
why they wanted to eliminate the Jewish onward of the
Lower East Side, because they wanted to take away as
much fodder as they could, you know, as much of
the you know, the argument that the anti immigration folks
were using.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
So I've written about Thomas Nast before. It was the
famous cartoonist who just lampooned people, including Boss Tweet with
Tammany Hall, with these cartoons oftentimes targeting immigrants, specifically Irish immigrants,
and they're sort of these caricatures of Irish people just
sort of slovenly and ruining. He was a nativist, clearly
(22:49):
and ruining New York City. So how were the Jewish gangsters,
I guess, or you know, the folks in the Lower
East Side versus the German Jewish folks, how were they
to picked it in the media or how how did
they fit into the media.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
It was all of that. It was the same kind
of things. Jews are all gamblers. That's why they that's
why they like the stock market, you know, so much,
because they're gamblers. They're they're you know, inherently a moral
people who we should not consider part of the Protestant,
lily white, blue blood future that we see for the US.
(23:28):
And information about Jewish crime was wonderful for them. It
was always saleable. It was just great stuff. And so
you can kind of feel what those German Jews might
have felt like, we got to get rid of this. Meanwhile,
it was it was a tough proposition because the German
(23:49):
Jews were trying to have obviously the best relationship that
they could with the co religionist downtown, despite the fact
they come from different backgrounds, like, these are our people.
We want to elevate these people. And so in addition
to trying to get rid of the underworld, the German
Jews provided a ton of philanthropy. They built free hospitals,
(24:13):
free education. They had pasteurized milk depots where women could
go get pasteurized milk for free, which then eliminated the
typhoid problem. I mean, they had free matza giveaways on passover,
free shoes in the winter time, there were a number
of things they were doing that were much less controversial,
(24:34):
but when it comes to eliminating crime, it's obviously more
controversial because you're going to get kickback from folks who say,
why are you coming down here and calling to sell criminals?
Why are you painting us with the same brush that
all the anti Semites want. So it was the crime
fight begins secretively a little bit for that reason, and
(24:55):
then it becomes eventually more of a public thing.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
I'm not sure where we are local politics in nineteen twelve,
what we're talking about, but I know that Tammany you know,
the Democrats whilst tweet they pandered to the immigrants which
were voting in mass for them, because they were saying,
we're here for you. Was that the situation or was
there anybody on the side of Jewish immigrants, either the
(25:19):
wealthy or the not wealthy.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Yes, So, when the German Jews are trying to make
their moves and trying to elevate the downtowners and massage
the relationship as much as they can, one of the
competitors to them was Tammany Hall. Because Tammany Hall was
trying to do a similar thing. But in a different way.
(25:41):
They were also trying to cater to the immigrant masses
because their votes were valuable, and one of the ways
you could cater to them is by making sure they
got out of prison when they committed a crime. I mean,
that's a bit of a simplification, but not really. And
so that was another hurdle that the reformers needed needed
(26:02):
to get over.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
It's so interesting because, you know, Boss Tweed was perhaps
the most corrupted politician of that time period, but he
started so many social programs specifically to get votes, you know,
and it's so odd to think of that dynamic, somebody
who could be so corrupt, But at the same time
his corruption is beneficial to some of the really disenfranchised
(26:24):
people in New York in that time period.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
And Tammany also winds up supporting the movement for labor
laws that becomes sort of the kernel of the modern
day Democratic Party. Not that there's not a ton of
corruption in both parties, but it is interesting to think
that our modern Democratic party really does start with Tammany Hall.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
So where do we start now, So we've got the
German Jewish folks kind of you know, trying to reform,
So tell me more about who they recruit, who who
is the person that they bring in that they try
that are trying to change. How can you do that
when it's obviously such a systemic issue where they live
and how they're treated in general in the way that
(27:06):
they're reacting as refugees yees.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
So the person that they bring in is a young
man named Abe Schoenfeld. I was talking about him a
bit earlier. He's the son of a reformer. He is
embarrassed and ashamed by the crime in his neighborhood among
his people. He's also, by the young age of twenty one,
(27:29):
he's already lost many of his friends to the underworld
into crime, and he is really motivated to do essentially
what the German Jews uptown also want to do, but
his reasons are maybe a little bit more personal, and
he's growing up in a really interesting time. He's born
(27:50):
in eighteen ninety one, and by the early nineteen hundreds,
nineteen oh five, oh six, oh seven, eight, those years,
the reformers uptown, the wealthy people who want to eliminate
the underworld, want to reform the criminal underworld. They are
hiring people like a young folks who are from the ghetto,
(28:11):
to produce research about the underworld, to write pamphlets and
articles and research reports about sex work, about the gambling problem,
about the horse poisoners, and all of these things. So
Abe drops out of high school as a freshman. He
(28:32):
was a freshman at Stuyvesant High and interestingly, the reason
that he dropped out is not because he was like
a bad student. He was actually one of the best students.
There was an interesting around nineteen oh six that was
the Eastern European Jewish immigration peaked the Principles that the
schools of Manhattan got together and said, we have to
(28:52):
cut down our ranks because we have too many kids.
So one of the solutions they came up with was
just to advise their top students to leave, basically saying
that if you stay, we just don't think you're going
to learn much because the pace of learning is going
to be slowed down so much. So Abe was one
of those people who was called in and they said, look,
(29:15):
if you have a career in mind, something you want
to go pursue, this would be a fine time to
go and do it. And he did. He had a
dad who was a reformer, and he wanted to follow
in that path and see if his sort of generation
could maybe have more success than his father's generation had.
(29:35):
So he spends you know, he's fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen
years old and he's going around the Lower East Side.
He's interviewing sex workers, he's producing reports, he's getting paid
by the uptowners. Is almost like a freelance reporter type.
And then the summer of nineteen twelve comes along and
(29:55):
by now Abe is twenty one years old and he's
already jaded about this whole reform project because he's been
producing all this writing and research, but it hasn't achieved anything.
And he sees how it's often used in the end,
which is to get a headline in a newspaper or
to elect a certain politician. But they call him in
(30:17):
after the murder of the gambler in the summer of
nineteen twelve, they call a Bin and they say, look,
we want to get more aggressive. Do you think you
can help? And so that's when Abe's story really begins,
and they want him to start with the gamblers. They say, okay,
(30:39):
how can we make effective inroads to eliminate the gambling problem?
Because they were like casinos all over the city, but
particularly Lower East Side, and he said, well, you need
to find the name of the cop and the NYPD
who takes the monthly payments from the gamblers. In the
same way that the pimps had their own sort of corporation,
(31:01):
their own fraternity, the guys in the gambling arena also
had their own association. And so I said, well, you
need to find the name of the cop who gets
the payment. And they said, okay, can you do that?
And over the next few months he sort of against
the odds, has success with that. And when he has
(31:22):
success with that, the Mayor of New York, who is
a really fascinating figure, he sees what they're doing, what
the German Jews have done with this young kid, and
they say, hey, what if we install this kid in
the NYPD, will let him choose the cops that he
wants to work with, because he knows who's corrupted, who
(31:42):
takes money, and who doesn't. They can go around the
neighborhood and maybe eventually around around the city and shut down,
you know, whatever he thinks he is shutting down. And
it's just an enormous amount of power and responsibility to
put into the hands of any but particularly a twenty
one year old. So that was like the kernel of
(32:05):
the story. That was what I initially discovered in research
back in about twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, and it was
just a really compelling footnote to start with. I thought,
who was this guy? What did he actually do? And
that's what set me on the path to writing the book.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
This initially even must have been very, very dangerous though
for Abe, because he's from that neighborhood. He's going around
all of a sudden asking questions when he was once
in school and now he's really you know, asking I'm
assuming not dumb enough to drop things down right in
front of people. But then you're moving forward and he's
trying to figure out, you know, who the cop is,
(32:48):
and then he'll be installed there. He's straddling to worlds,
both of which could have been dangerous on either side.
You know, having money can make you dangerous. Maybe he
knew too much, so I assume I think a lot
of well not a lot of your sources, but I
know one of your sources was Abe. Is that right?
He did some writing on this.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Yeah. Abe had written an unpublished memoir that he started
in the late nineteen twenties, and he worked on an
audit off for the next fifty years. And when he
died in nineteen seventy seven, he had about a dozen
different drafts of this memoir that were in his papers,
(33:30):
and the papers were all inherited by a niece of his,
actually a grand niece who had kind of been like
a daughter to him because he never had a kid
of his own. So the grand niece inherited these papers,
and forty years later, when her husband wanted the space
in their home back, the niece donates the papers to
(33:52):
a research institution in New York, and that's how I
was able to see them. But that memoir was a
huge source source of information. One of the interesting things
about the memoir was that it was not his entire
life that he was trying to cover, even though he
did amazing things in the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties
(34:14):
as well, he moved on to a whole new field.
But when he looked back on his life, he thought
the most interesting and unique thing was this crime fight
that I was involved in for several years on the
Lower East Side. So the memoir was a couple hundred
pages long, and it was all about this one five
to ten year span of time.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
So he at age twenty one, is then, you know,
recruited essentially to be in the NYPD and create his
own squad. Tell me about what happens moving forward. Where
does the twenty one year old start with reforming you know,
the Jewish gangsters in the Lower east Side to please
the you know, Upper West Side. I presumed Jewish folks
(34:54):
from Germany and the mayor who has now hired him.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
It's super person for him. He's from the neighborhood. He's
grown up just surrounded by all of this stuff, so
he knows, he knows everything about He's been a researcher
for sort of like an underworld researcher for several years.
He really knows where all the bodies are buried, so
(35:19):
to speak. And he's been kind of dreaming for years
about this kind of opportunity and what he might do.
He's been talking about it with his dad for years.
So he does come in surprisingly with the ideas and
with an agenda for how they need to go about
(35:41):
wiping out the Jewish underworld. And so the way that
it happens is they go kind of phase by phase.
So it starts with gamblers and the sex work industry,
moves on to the Yiddish horse poisoners and the gangsters.
The Jewish gangsters were working actually for the garment industry
(36:02):
and for the garment unions specifically because there was this,
like I said, there weren't any labor laws, and so
the Jewish unions on the Lower East Side became more
and more radical and aggressive over the years as they're
responding to all this injustice in the labor field, and
(36:23):
they had finally resorted to hiring the gangs to go
and attack the manufacturers and the factories. So when there
was a strike on when there was a labor strike on,
of course you have manufacturers that are going to go
and hire scout workers to get around the strike. And
in the past the unions hadn't had any way to
(36:45):
sort of to control that. And so once we move
into nineteen oh nine, nineteen ten, nineteen eleven, these years,
you have these unions who are basically forming an army,
and so that became another app yet yet another aspect
of the larger picture of you know, the underworld and
what Abe needed to go after.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Well, how do you go after that entire industry sex
work and the garments and you know, and working with
grocers and poisoning horses and everything. How do you, one
by one, how do you take these you know, systemic
issues down.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
So that's a great question, and it kind of gets
to the heart of everything. The way Abe approached it
was that you have to sever the tie between the
underworld and the overworld. So in any given facet of
the underworld, there's a point there's a cop taking money,
there's a politician supporting the cop, or a politician supporting
(37:45):
the lead pimp or whatever, and you need to expose
the connection and sever it. And so that was part
of the strategy.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
What does he think is the biggest emergency, the largest
fire to put out? First? Did you say it was
the sex work first? I can't remember.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
I would say it was it was sex work. That
was the thing that had been portrayed really really in
the national and the international news as being what the
Jews are about. It was the way you smear the
Lower East Side is talking about all the sex work.
And it was also just a lot of shame. It
was like, look at these people, you know, they don't
(38:23):
even care. They just sell their daughters on the street
and all of this stuff. The girl Abe and fall
in love with as a teenager had left him and
gone back to the streets as a sex worker. So
for Abe, this was that was extremely personal. So, you know,
they go after the sex work industry. That's in the
(38:44):
Winner of nineteen thirteen, and then they sort of move on.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
So who's the enabler and the government with sex work?
Is it a particular cop or a politician who would
even you know, keep an eye on that.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Well, so it was a gigantic industry that was generating
a lot of money, and there were there were two
figures in the sex work industry. There was the head
of what I referred to earlier sort of the Corporation
of Pips by the way. Their official title was the
(39:16):
Independent Benevolent Association, the IBA, that's what that's what they
called themselves. And they had kind of this president figure
who was like the king pimp. And there was also
a woman who was the largest brothel owner on the
Lower East Side. And so those were two really important
(39:37):
figures who were responsible for funneling all of this, all
this money up up to the cops. The way that
they approached the sex industry was by it was more
boots on the ground raiding the brothels. So it was
brothel raid after brothel raid, and that's the way the
(39:59):
casinos were managed as as well. And eventually, you know,
you tried to have a situation that just made it
impossible for folks to make money the way that they
had been used to making money.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
I mean, could they just pick up and move to
New Jersey? Some did that, well, I understand New Jersey,
but would there be I mean that would this not
continue in a different borough? Would you then be able
to target different boroughs or were their jurisdictions where you
just Abe couldn't reach out past Lower East Side.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
There was a lot of reaching out and there whenever
the reaching out sort of the expansion would happen, there'd
be some pushback against the expansion. But Abe and the
Incorruptible Squad, they would go to Coney Island. They did
work in New Jersey a little bit. They would go
to other parts of Manhattan, but yeah, you couldn't. Obviously,
(40:51):
they were trying to clean up their neighborhood. That was
the mandate. And it does become a whack a mole
thing where you can eliminate it, and it pops up elsewhere.
I think it's really one of the interesting things to
know is that all the conventional wisdom we have today
about how vice works and how anti vice laws work.
(41:14):
For instance, we know today you can have laws against narcotics,
but those laws are going to have nothing to do
with the demand for narcotics. The demand remains, and it
gets supplied in a new, more dangerous way by marginalized
people who are willing to take the risk. That sort
of wisdom didn't exist back then because there had been
(41:34):
really no anti vice laws. One of the important political
movements that's happening in the background of the story is
this movement against vice itself, and the very first laws
against vice are just starting to come into existence. For instance,
up until about nineteen ten, you can walk into your
corner pharmacy and by pretty much any narcotic you could
(41:59):
think of, you know, opium and heroin would be sold
a dozen different ways, you know, into it's like like
a dispensary today, but more so. And then these anti
drug laws start to come into being, first of the
state level than at the federal level. The first anti
sex work law comes into being in nineteen ten. That's
(42:22):
the Man Act, which we still have today. So these
things were just starting to exist, and it was the
anti vice movement. Obviously that kind of helps Abe do
what he ends up doing because he has this legal
power now behind him as well.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
Does AB's job with NYPD and leading this squad. Does
it stretch into prohibition time period?
Speaker 2 (42:45):
It stretches into the very earliest months of prohibission nineteen
eighteen nineteen nineteen, before it's really even officially taken effect.
And by then Abe is now ten years older, he's
(43:07):
thirty years old. He's starting to look back and he's like, Oh,
all these laws that we had once cheered on that
helped us clean our neighborhoods were now going to be
bad for society because he'd seen how when you move
the law from the local or the state level to
(43:29):
the federal level, it just becomes a law enforcement industry
that's going to feed on itself. So again, this is
conventional wisdom we have today, but Abe sort of learned
this in real time, and he kind of learned it
the hard way, and in a way, I think he
regretted having been part of that movement.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
If we go back to when the first few years
where he's doing this as kind of a practical matter,
he's eliminating a lot of jobs. I mean, he's shutting
down gambling and sex work and I'm sure raising hell
in the gormt industry too. So is there a negative
to what's happening and let's take out the morals and
(44:12):
the hurt that comes with all of these industries. Are
we leaving people unemployed at this point? Or again, it
sounds like a vast amount of people it's going to
affect in the Lower East Side.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
It's that's more of a personal view. I guess every
you know, reader of the book is going to walk
away with a different view on that. It depends, you know,
do you feel that sex work should be free and
clear and uninhibited. Do you feel that gambling should be open?
But those were those were multimillion dollar industries, and that's
(44:43):
multi million in nineteen twelve. You have to multiply multimillion
by about twenty five to get them to get the
modern day dollars. So yeah, he was putting a ton
of people out of a job. And the fact that
he didn't get killed, I mean, the fact that that
he ended up living through. This was one I think
of the great miracles of the story.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
To eighty seven. I was trying to do the math.
I mean, I think that's Howlid he was. So it
just seems like for somebody with a normal life, you know,
living through the early nineteen hundreds seems you know, pretty
impressive to begin with. So is that what he would
consider looking back, even though I know you say that
he probably had some regrets about some of this. Is
(45:26):
that his heyday then nineteen twelve two or nineteen ten,
whenever he started, until you know, the eighteen nineteen, eighteen,
nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
I think it was his heyday. And I think as
he got older and aged through the twentieth century, he
looked back on that time period with it with a
special fondness and a pride because he could see how
it was getting forgotten. He could see how all these
incredible events of the twentieth century that he himself was
(45:56):
living through with just eclipsing knowledge about what happened in
the US prior to World War One. You know, I
think there's a reason that historians call the First World
War the comma of the twentieth century. It's that point
on which everything turns and the world was just totally different.
Up until nineteen thirteen, it was one thing, and then
(46:20):
nineteen fourteen fifteen comes along and we move into a
totally different era. And on top of that, the story
that he himself was involved in was also itself secretive
when it was going on. So I think that's maybe
where the impetus for this memoir came is, I have
to put this down somewhere. It was secretive when it
(46:41):
happened and kind of later buried by later events.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
Tell me what you think the impact was. Can you
paint a picture me. I think we had a pretty
clear picture of the Lower east Side and certainly people
living in poverty, and as you said, sixteen hundred people
crammed into one block. After he has done effectively with
you know, this sort of this really big sweep and
trying to achieve what he has in his head is
(47:07):
for the better of his people in the Lower east Side,
What does lower the Lower east Side look like when
he's done?
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Lower east Side looks much different. There is still crime,
there's still vice, of course that didn't go away, but
the neighborhood itself had definitely been elevated. You had people
moving uptown more and more out of the ghetto. So
it did have a big impact at the time. Interestingly,
(47:36):
Abe was never satisfied though, And that was another lesson
to be taken away from these sort of anti vice missions,
that that that would come to define the century. That
once you become a revolutionary against vice, and once once
you become a moral revolutionary, just like other kinds of revolution,
(48:00):
it's hard to know when to stop. You get your gains,
but you want more, and you want more. And Abe
himself was a young man when this was going on,
full of to some extent, full of piss and vinegar
and and and he wanted it to keep going. He
was he was begging these German Jewish uptowners, just give
me another, give me another twenty five thousand dollars, I
(48:22):
can run, you know, the alcohol out of the neighborhood.
You know, up until the very end, he wanted it
to continue and continue. And so that was that was
an interesting part of the story as well.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
So did he feel like he ever got the acknowledgment
that he should have gotten or could have gotten. I
know you said this was a secretive operation and dangerous.
I know you also said that he wrote this memoir
as a I got to get on the page before
I die, so somebody knows something. Was he left fairly satisfied,
though I know he's tinkering. But is he left like
with the feeling like I could I could finally sort
(48:56):
of move to what you had said would be a
new career for him.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
I think think by and large, Abe didn't care about
the credit, but he was still a human being who
had an ego, and he did feel that because of
the nature of what they were doing, in the secrecy
of it, that these other folks who ran crime crusades
(49:20):
later later in the century had gone down in history
books for doing things that were nearly as impressive as
what he had done. So I think there was there
was a little bit of that, But Abe went on
to just have this incredible career that you could not
make up. Because what happens is, you know, the nineteen
(49:41):
thirties arrived, which is this ugly, ugly period in American
history where Nazism and bigotry is seeping into American culture
and American thinking in a way that we don't really
acknowledge today. And by the late nineteen thirties or even
(50:04):
a little bit earlier than the late nineteen thirties, there
was a very real concern about all these state side
kind of Nazi organizations that were It was a lot
of white supremacists and KKK types coalescing into sort of
Nazi type type organizations, and there was a big movement
(50:26):
to recruit spies who could kind of root this stuff out.
And I believe the number that I've seen is that
approximately eight thousand people during the late thirties and into
the forties, about eight thousand Americans worked as spies here
(50:47):
at home to try to infiltrate these what we could
call white supremacist organizations. And Abe was again part part
of that, and that was a job that he had
for I think he signs onto that in nineteen thirty
eight and I think he retires from that in nineteen
(51:09):
sixty four.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
So that was really the bulk of his life was
fighting anti Semitism, begatry racism at home.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
So you're talking about a Jewish man from Eastern Europe
who's embedded with white supremacists here in America.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
Yeah. So he would have been the son of Hungarian
Jewish immigrants. He was born in the Lower East Side,
born in America. But yeah, he was a prolific spy,
which is really what he started out as when you
think about it, he was kind of a spy of
on a much more local level. He's a spy of
(51:46):
the underworld, trying to report to the folks with the money.
What is what? And that's really what he did with
the neo Nazis or whatever we want to call him.
Speaker 1 (51:57):
Did some very brave woman end up mary him and
having kids with him, knowing what what the hell he
gets into?
Speaker 2 (52:04):
He did get married a little bit later in life.
I mean it was especially for that time period, it
would have been considered late. I think he got married
to he's in this late thirties, to a woman named
Annie Evans, and they never had kids. They lived on
Central Park South for decades and they never had kids.
And she died in the late sixties and he died
in the late seventies.
Speaker 1 (52:25):
Now, we did not end up getting to I think
your other characters, right, did we even talk about your
great gats We didn't talk about Arnold at all, Rostein
or the woman.
Speaker 2 (52:35):
The young woman. Her name is Antonia Rolnick. Her underworld
nickname was Tony the tough. Yes, and she to me
is is you know, one of the most or the
most compelling figure in the story. She has not been
written about before. She's not a famous criminal of the
(52:56):
Lower east Side. She was someone that emerged from my research.
She came out of the archives. She had been written
about by Abe as he had fallen in love with her.
She was a pretty classic immigrant. She came here from
the pale of settlement when she was thirteen. Like other
(53:17):
junior high age people, especially the girls. She left school
in seventh or eighth grade and worked in the garment industry.
That was grueling. Didn't last for long, and she gets
lured into sex work, and that's kind of when her
story really picks up. Abe falls in love with her,
(53:39):
she leaves him. They later hook up again as essentially
partners in the crime fighting business. But Antonia Tony the tough,
She kind of goes back and forth throughout the story,
crossing the line from the underworld to the overworld, and
her her journey was very emblematic of the experiences of
(54:03):
young women on the Lower east Side. The types of
young women on the Lower east Side that we have
heard about before are usually these really exceptional ones who
were at the head of the labor movement and who
put their life on the line and the strikes, the
Clara Lemlicks and the people the people like that, taking
nothing away from them. They're amazing young women. But my
(54:27):
research seemed to indicate that most of the young women
on the Lower East Side that was not their experience.
Their experiences were more of a complicated one. So yeah,
Tony is an amazing figure. Arnold Rothstein is important to
the book because he helps us understand the implications of
(54:53):
trying to fight vice. So Abe is off, on the
one hand, going to war with the underworld, using the
the new anti vice laws to their maximum effect. And
what we see happen is as these anti vice laws
come into being, a new industry is created, because, as
we say, the demand doesn't go away. So Arnold Rostein
(55:15):
had become expert at trying to find the opportunities, finding
the opportunities in the anti vice laws. So as Abe
is going to war with the underworld, Arnold is capitalizing
on it. So those a in a nutshell, Abe, Antonia, Arnold,
(55:37):
the three A's. Those are the three main figures in
the book. There are many other figures in the book,
but those are those are the three who we kind
of follow from the beginning to the end.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
I sometimes get asked, why are you telling this story
right now? Like why is it relevant right now? So
why would this story resonate with readers in twenty twenty five?
Speaker 2 (55:57):
Well, I don't know. Over the weekend we had millions
of people marching because immigrants were being villainized, and there
that seems to be a just a perennium for us.
I'm not saying that this particular period was the beginning
of that. The nativist movement obviously goes back much much further,
(56:19):
but we do see an incredible example of it, and
we see something happen that wouldn't I don't think happened today.
But maybe we can learn from it, which is about
local politics and trying to improve your own neighborhood. Focus
(56:41):
on what is going on in your backyard and how
can we improve our neighborhood. While I was working on
the book, I often thought, would any of this happened today?
Would you have wealthy people who have an interest in
the ghetto try to wage a war on the underworld.
Maybe it does happen in some ways, you just don't
(57:02):
hear about it. The other reason I think it may
be relevant or resonance today is because we now do
take for granted all these anti vice laws that we have,
and I know that a lot of people feel negatively
about them. A lot of people feel that the whole purpose,
or at least the effect of the war on drugs
(57:24):
is to warehouse black and brown bodies in a prison.
An extremely compelling and persuisive argument can be made on
behalf of that viewpoint. The story I'm telling is the
origins of that larger story.
Speaker 1 (57:52):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners, All About the
Ghost Club, All that Is Wicked, American Sherlock, and Don't
Forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime
podcast Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.
(58:12):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis Amerosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer.
Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff,
and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook
(58:34):
at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more.
And if you know of a historical crime that could
use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked,
email us at info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com. We'll
also take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words.
Speaker 2 (59:00):
E
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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